America is not as divided as you might think — here's the proof

It was 13 years ago that a young state senator from Illinois
stood in front of the country and declared that "there's not a
liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United
States of America."

Since that 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention
catapulted Barack Obama to the presidency, these states have felt
less united than ever — whether you define that as red versus
blue, cities versus country, or coasts versus the center. This is
the era of the 99%, "death panels," Black Lives Matter, and
Donald Trump.

Barack Obama at the 2004
Democratic National Convention.Kevin
Lamarque/Reuters

It's why you may feel as if the US isn't one nation but rather a
collection of bubbles, each with its own politics, economic
issues, culture, demographics, and beliefs.

Business Insider reporters have spent the past four months
traveling the country, including stops in Alabama, Iowa, Texas,
and Vermont, looking at many of the ways this nation is divided
but also searching for common ground. The result is more than 24
stories coming this summer, featuring the voices of more than 100
Americans. What we've found is a nation still grappling with
issues that have bedeviled us for decades, like school
segregation, but also a country that is more complex than the
traditional narrative of division would suggest.

We're calling the series "Undividing America." We're not
"undivided" yet, nor is this country anything like the "united"
states that Obama spoke of. But for all the issues that remain
intractable, we found signs of hope.

71% of Americans believe climate change is real — including a
group of Trump-supporting Texans

Consider this. While lawmakers in Washington squabble, 1,300
miles away in Texas, liberals and conservatives are coming
together on the environment.

Already, you find ranchers and farmers with wind turbines and
solar panels on their land. On the open plains, it makes
financial sense. And that's in part why the state is a laboratory
for a tenuous truce.

"I'm a Republican. I'm also a huge environmentalist," Ryan
Sitton, Texas' railroad commissioner, who regulates the oil and
gas industry in the state, told Business Insider's Rebecca
Harrington.

The irony, she found in a
story that kicks off our summerlong series, is that it's
possible to make progress on climate change — if you don't use
the phrase "climate change."

Some of the conservatives she spoke with believe humans, burning
their carbon-dioxide-emitting fossil fuels, are causing global
warming. Others, like Sitton, don't buy it, but they still
support environmental policies — focusing on clean air, water,
soil, and energy — that can reduce carbon. Now environmentalists
from both sides are changing the way they talk about climate
change so that even those who are skeptical can get on board.

92% of Americans agree that the government should be able
to negotiate with drug companies

Business Insider's Michelle Mark found a similar story with
criminal-justice reform in the state.

In 2005, after years of "tough on crime" policies that put many
offenders away for long sentences, Texas' prisons were so full
that Republicans and Democrats teamed up to introduce a bill to
the state legislature that diverted funds into treatment centers
and rehabilitation programs. It was an effort to reintegrate some
of the 20,000 inmates incarcerated statewide for nonviolent drug
offenses.

Some called the measure "soft" on crime, but a coalition of
liberal groups, conservative think tanks, and prominent
Republican donors coalesced and won the support of Republican
Gov. Rick Perry in 2007, and in the decade since these "smart on
crime" ideas have spread to an eclectic mix of states including
Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida, Wisconsin, and New
Mexico.

Houston
lawmakers and representatives of Southwestern Baptist Theological
Seminary helped celebrate the opening of the state’s first
four-year seminary program to operate entirely behind the walls
of a Texas prison.Associated
Press/Pat Sullivan

On other issues, there are surprises. Americans largely agree on
what they want from their healthcare: reasonable costs, more
people covered, and better outcomes. For instance,
92% of Americans agree that the government should be able to
negotiate Medicare drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, and
84% agree that Medicaid expansion should continue. But
disagreement on how to achieve those goals has led to a bitter,
politically fraught argument over the future of the Affordable
Care Act.

Business Insider's Bob Bryan found that how you market the ACA,
better known as Obamacare, makes a big difference. Kentucky named
its Obamacare exchange "Kynect." Kentuckians flocked to the
state's program, making it one of the healthcare law's success
stories. The only problem was many people didn't realize that
Kynect had anything to do with President Obama's healthcare
overhaul. So when the governor's office changed parties, the
future of Kentuckians' healthcare was thrown into flux. Now, the
state's residents are facing the prospect of losing the
healthcare they depend on.

'Most issues ... become local issues'

Along our journey, another recurring theme is that America's
politics are more complex than the typical left-right split.

Lee Maassen is a Republican, but the reality of his work makes
his politics complicated. As Business Insider's Dana Varinsky
learned when she traveled to his Iowa dairy farm in May, he
employs 26 people and 16 are immigrants, mostly from Mexico.

That has created a gulf between farmers like Maassen who
increasingly have trouble finding Americans willing to work on
farms and a Republican Party that, under Trump, is taking a
harder line against immigration.

Complicated politics can be found within a single family, too.

Watch a sneak peek of Rebecca and Mary's story here.

One mother and daughter in Alabama hadn't talked much since
Trump's election. The mother, Mary, adopted Rebecca from South
Korea in the 1980s. Rebecca told Business Insider's Graham
Flanagan that her mom's political beliefs were so different from
hers that it became nearly impossible to carry on a conversation.
And Rebecca says Mary makes comments about her ethnic background
that Rebecca finds offensive. In May, Flanagan traveled to
Montgomery, Alabama, to be there when Mary and Rebecca finally
sat down to take their first steps toward making peace.

In a Vermont town, another fight is playing out. Rutland was
supposed to welcome 100 Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Instead,
voters ousted the five-term Democratic mayor who proposed the
plan, and only a handful of families actually made it. Now,
Business Insider's Jeremy Berke will tell us about how a new
mayor is trying to mend the rift in the town.

BI's Eliza Relman introduces us to two governors who managed to
get elected in states dominated by an opposing party. Republican
Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts appealed to the deeply blue
state by campaigning on his progressive social positions, fiscal
discipline, and successful record in Massachusetts state politics
and business.

Democratic
Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana won over voters in the conservative
state.Matt Volz /
AP

And in Montana, Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock won over
Republicans and Trump voters with door-to-door politics,
convincing working-class Montanans with an economy-focused
agenda, which helped him win them over on core issues like "equal
pay for equal work." And he held firm on some nonnegotiables for
Montanans, like gun rights.

"From my perspective, most issues ... don't become even sort of
the hardline Democrat or Republican issues — they become local
issues," Bullock told Relman.

86% of Americans want more infrastructure spending

Look at America over the past 40 years, and you'll see remarkable
shifts in beliefs on certain issues and remarkable stasis on
others.

Take same-sex marriage and abortion.

From just 2007 to 2017, public support for gay marriage in the US
has soared to 62% from 37%.

But over 40 years (1977 to today), the public's view on the
legality of abortion has stayed relatively stable.

Skye Gould / Business Insider

We tend to agree on other issues. A whopping 86% of Americans
believe the government should spend the same or more on
infrastructure projects. Seventy percent of Americans want more
spending on public education.

Skye Gould/Business Insider

But it's in education where we find other divides. BI's Graham
Flanagan reveals how, a half-century after the civil-rights
movement, the nation still has stark racial lines.

In 2000, Flanagan graduated from Tuscaloosa's Central High
School, which had been a model of integration after a federal
court ordered the Alabama city to desegregate its schools in the
late '70s. The city built Central after the order, and for years
a diverse group of students made the school a model for the state
— in both academics and athletics. But about the time
Flanagan graduated, the court lifted its order. The school
board then voted to split Central into three schools. Two of them
are nearly entirely black. Flanagan went back recently to
see what had happened since he left, and the video is
eye-opening.

Race and class play into other stories, too. We'll look at mass
incarceration and what happens when felons leave prison. Those
with a criminal record face tremendous obstacles to finding jobs,
housing, and even marriages. And if they were allowed to vote in
some states, it could change who wins elections.

Culture in 'The Middle' "All in the Family" was
one of the most popular shows in the 1970s.CBS

If you watched television in the 1970s, it was hard to miss a
Norman Lear television show. From "All in the Family" to "Maude"
and "The Jeffersons," Lear created and ran more than a half dozen
of television's most popular shows back then, reaching 30 million
to 40 million viewers a night.

There were, of course, only three broadcast channels at the time,
so the networks had to program for a cross section of the nation.
There was no conservative network or liberal network. There were
no heavily produced shows reaching small niches on HBO or
Netflix.

But Lear's plots featured discussion of race and class and hot
buttons like abortion.

Norman
Lear.Music Box
Films

"We were encouraging conversations about issues," Lear, 94, told
Business Insider in June. "Right now, it's far more fractured and
far fewer people are being influenced or consciences raised
because there's just so many places for drama and entertainment."

Business Insider's Jethro Nededog will look at whether it's even
possible for a television show to push conversation across
divides in 2017. One possibility is a show called "The Middle,"
which features a working-class Indiana family. It has been on a
few years but is having its cultural moment now.

"People realized, 'Hey, wait, you guys are a Midwest show about
blue-collar people,' and all of a sudden we felt like the show
kind of had a new attention brought to it," DeAnn Heline, the
cocreator of the ABC comedy, told Business Insider.

"The Middle" is an ABC show that could bridge
divides.ABC/Michael
Ansell

Bridging divides

In Washington, our politics seem more polarized than ever. Party
leaders spent years engineering congressional districts to allow
more partisan politicians to win seats in the House of
Representatives. That has left fewer leaders trying to appeal to
an American middle ground and less willing to compromise with
their peers on the other side.

Americans have
sorted themselves, too. Liberals with advanced degrees are
increasingly moving to big, coastal cities, living next to people
who look like them and agree with them.

In rural and exurban communities, you're likely to find
conservative churchgoers. They tend to be less educated and more
affected by seismic economic shifts. As BI's Elena Holodny will
report, many in these regions sought out jobs in retail and other
service sectors as manufacturing jobs vanished to outsourcing and
automation. Now those jobs are at risk too, succumbing to
e-commerce and a shift away from buying things at malls and
instead paying for experiences like meals and travel.

That's just the start. In the weeks to come, "Undividing America"
will look at how Chick-fil-A moved beyond its Southern and
Christian image and conquered cities like New York. We'll profile
today's teenagers, examining how they live their lives, what they
believe, and whether they're hopeful about the future. We'll look
at what happens when a bank decides to forgo its normal standards
and give loans to lower-income residents of Detroit (spoiler:
borrowers pay them reliably and the loans help improve lives).
Our reporters will consider "safe spaces" on college campuses and
efforts to diversify thought in the classroom. And we'll find out
what happens when leaders of a city that is literally divided by
a highway decide to put things back the way they were.

We're not covering every divide and every issue. After the 2016
election, many have been reported on extensively already. But
it's our hope that over the next few weeks you'll get a new sense
of the problems the country faces and the people who are working
— and sometimes succeeding — to undivide America.